PETROPOLIS

PETROPOLIS; Humans Learn a New Trick: Sharing Dinner With Fido

By JULIE V. IOVINE

Published: June 3, 2001

PEGGY GEISSLER'S nephew raided the refrigerator one night and ate an entire container of dog food. He wasn't acting out -- he thought it was homemade stew. Ms. Geissler, a career development consultant in Little Silver, N.J., was thawing turkey, brown rice and broccoli crowns to feed to her two West Highland terriers. ''I always used to feed my dogs only the premium brands, but if you read the labels, you still don't know what's in them,'' said Ms. Geissler, who switched to so-called human-grade pet food to try to cope with the dogs' chronic skin and digestive troubles. ''This way, I know I'm doing all I can to keep them alive as long as possible.''

Human-grade dog and cat food, made only of ingredients that a person could consider eating, sounds like an expensive contradiction. But it has become the rallying cry of a grass-roots movement of devoted pet owners concerned about the health and longevity of their four-footed soul mates. Driven more by anecdotal than scientific evidence, they are turning to alternative health treatments, and especially home-quality cooking, to combat things like cancerous tumors, old-age arthritis, lethargy, even chronic bad breath.

Tales of near-miraculous recoveries making the rounds at the dog runs have not only fueled the movement but also led to a growing subclass of boutique pet-food manufacturers, who offer pricey pet meals made with organic vegetables, homeopathic vitamin supplements and sometimes -- and more controversially -- raw meat and bones. Even the $12 billion pet food industry, founded in the postwar years to recycle slaughterhouse byproducts, sees a day of reckoning and is offering its own versions of pet health food.

Jeffrey and Kerry Pedone of Rumson, N.J. are converts to human-grade dog food. The couple, both trained as teachers, bought a dog soon after they met four years ago. Duffy, their golden retriever, wouldn't eat, not even premium dog foods. Veterinarians blamed allergies that would be expensive and time-consuming to investigate.

The couple wound up cooking Duffy's meals themselves from high-grade cuts of meat, long grains and farm-fresh vegetables. ''The relationship and the dog were new, and we worked on all this together,'' Mr. Pedone said. Duffy lapped it up. In fact, the couple routinely ate the same dinner they had prepared for him -- until they turned vegetarian. In 1999, Mr. Pedone quit teaching and founded Good Dog Foods (www.gooddogfoods.com), vacuum-packing human-grade turkey, beef and chicken dinners with vegetables, rice and a nutritional powder, at about $4.99 a daily portion.

Dr. Michael Farber, a veterinarian in Manhattan, is skeptical about small-scale dog food producers. ''Some of the smaller companies have a problem with making sure that every batch is consistent, and dogs with sensitive stomachs might have a problem,'' he said. ''If someone really wants to do home cooking for their pet, they should consult with a nutritionist. If you're not consistent, you're not doing your animal justice.''

Such food is a long way from the leftover scraps and miscellaneous-meat kibble that have been the mainstays of many cat and dog diets for the past 60 years.

The gourmeting of pet food arises from some of the same cultural shifts that have catapulted Rover from the doghouse to the master bed -- part of an ''our pets, ourselves'' mentality. ''The more people feel that their pets are part of the family rather than their property, the more likely they are going to want to treat their animals like they treat themselves,'' said Dr. Larry Hawk, president of the A.S.P.C.A., in New York.

Diet can have ''a profound impact on an animal's health,'' Dr. Hawk acknowledged, but he cautioned that people need to be careful about what they feed pets. ''Dogs are omnivores and cats are carnivores,'' he said. ''They have requirements. Some of these trends are more about the owner's lifestyle than about nutritional value.''

The pet food industry is trying to come to terms with the home-cooking trend. At the Pet Food Institute in Washington, the industry trade association, Stephen Payne, the public relations manager, said, ''We don't have a position on the issue of human grade, because it is not a descriptor of pet food recognized by the American Association of Feed Control Officials.'' (The association is a group of state and federal officials regulating standards for animal feed.)

Meanwhile, Ralston Purina is parrying the trend with a new pet food, Purina Beneful, that has some real beef and the right look. It is ''a crunchy food formulated in various shapes and colors to look very much like a kind of human-looking dish, like a stew,'' said Kerry Lyman, a spokeswoman.

When Sara Muirhead's Rottweiler, Berin, came down with lupus, it changed both their lives. On the advice of her homeopathic vet, Ms. Muirhead, who was studying sculpture in Manhattan, started making recipes from ''Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs & Cats'' (Rodale Press, 1995), a 380-page compendium of recipes, nutrition news, medical diagnostics and advice on subjects as diverse as fur brushing and coping with pet death. The recipe for ''dog loaf,'' for example, calls for ingredients like lean beef heart, eggs, corn, bone meal, soy sauce and a clove of garlic. ''Serve raw,'' it concludes.